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Monday, 24 June 2013

A fourteenth-century lawyer's handbook

Your blogger’s favourite item from Worcester Cathedral
Library’s law collection is a fourteenth-century lawyer’s handbook. Unlike the
law textbooks studied by the monks at Worcester Cathedral priory, this handbook
was in day-to-day use in the courtroom. The manuscript, as a result, displays
signs of heavy usage. Most eye-catching are the “medieval sticky notes”
protruding from the pages. These are called parchment place-markers. The
parchment place-markers are pictured below. They are very dark in colour,
probably because the vellum has absorbed a lot of dirt from being touched.

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Photograph, Statuta Anglie. Photograph reproduced by the permission of the Chapter of Worcester Cathedral (U.K.)

It seems probable that it was the lawyer himself who made
these sticky notes. Upon inspection they appear to be small, rectangular pieces
of vellum, folded in half vertically. Whereas modern day sticky notes have
adhesive on one side, these parchment place-markers are doubly glued. That is
to say, the left hand side of parchment-marker is pasted to the recto and the
right-hand side is pasted to the verso. As a result a tiny loop is created that
protrudes from the page, and it is this that the user touches to find certain
sections. That the parchment place-markers are glued to both recto and verso
may well be why they are, quite literally, hanging on almost six hundred years
after they were made. These parchment place-markers are, moreover, significant in
so far as they reflect a different way of highlighting sections of a manuscript
to what we usually encounter with monks’ textbooks. Tamsin Rowe, predecessor to
your blogger, in her exhibition on Worcester’s manuscripts discussed the way in
which monks used marginal illustrations and drolleries to highlight and refer
back to important sections of texts, during their hours of private study. Here
is a good example of a way in which a monk would highlight a section of a text.
This little pointing hand is found in a fourteenth-century textbook, Averroes' commentary on Aristotle's physics, used at Oxford:
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Photograph, Averroes, Commentum magnum on Aristotle, Physica. Photograph reproduced by the permission of the Chapter of Worcester Cathedral (U.K.)

By comparison, the parchment place-makers in the Statuta Anglie serve as more of a
physical marker which would allow the medieval lawyer to quickly flick to the
right law when in the courtroom. Unlike the Benedictine monks, the medieval
lawyer who owned the handbook probably did not have time to casually browse to
find the section he was looking for. The Statuta
Anglie contains 37 different law texts, the first being the Magna Carta,
the second being the Charter of the Forest. With such a large number of texts
in a relatively small book (210 mm x 145 mm), finding a page could well have
gotten you in a tizzy in the medieval courtroom.

Another aspect of this manuscript that I enjoy are the humorous illustrations that decorate its pages.For instance, onf.156 there is evidence that the lawyer may
well have had a dull day in the courtroom, for he draws little pictures of
sausage dogs in the margins and, what appears to be, an imp-like man who is
either pointing at himself or on the cusp of picking his nose!

Equally intriguing is how this fourteenth-century handbook
found its way to Worcester. In the catalogue of Worcester Cathedral’s
manuscripts, it is noted that the handbook was probably “used in the Hereford
diocese, coming to Worcester after the reformation.” The first few folios are dated at Bosbury in 1334.On
f.286 v the name “Rocheford” appears written in a formal hand, and the
signature has been dated to 1400.

The next information on the manuscript’s ownership is not
until the seventeenth century; on f,.7 r in a seventeenth-century hand is
written the name “Fransisci Harewell armigeri” of Birlingham. Birlingham is
parish located roughly twenty minutes away from Worcester. The name Sir Francis
Harwell appears on another book at Worcester Cathedral Library, a sixteenth-century
printed law book.

Both books are thought to be donated by Sir Francis Harewell
in 1676. A Thomas Harewell, possibly the son of Francis, is known to have
donated books to the library in the 1690s. We know very little about either of the
Harewell’s mentioned. An interesting area for researchwould certainly be the Harewell family; an
exploration of who they were, how they obtained this medieval law book, and whether
they had any particular affiliation with practicing law (given that both books
they donated to the Cathedral relate to practicing law). The pursuit of answers
to these questions could possibly yield some interesting results.

If you enjoyed this week’s blog and would like
to see the lawyer’s handbook up close then might enjoy taking a tour of the library.
From 5th-31st of August, we will be running two tours
daily. The cost is £5.00 per person (£2.50 for under 16s).